The Banality of Scientific Progress: An etiology of the #CRISPRbabies controversy

• In Event: 1452 - Genetics, Identity, and Other Controversies

Abstract

Following a media leak on the eve of the 2nd International Summit on Genome Editing in Hong Kong, He Jiankui announced the birth of genome-edited twins from a clinical trial for a CRISPR-based vaccine for HIV. In the controversy that ensued, scientists and ethicists exclaimed that Jiankui was a “rogue[,] Chinese Frankenstein” that had departed from the consensus of the scientific community and failed to proceed with legitimate oversight. To examine the social and geopolitical etiology of this public controversy, I draw from ethnographic research conducted in genome-editing laboratories in the Bay Area, the International Summit in Hong Kong, as well as interviews with key scientists linked to Jiankui prior to the leak.
Building on past sociological research on scientific controversies and the politics of knowledge, this paper frames the reaction of the scientific community to the #CRISPRbabies controversy as a crisis of legitimacy and subsequent repair. Though the controversy was diagnosed by summit organizers as a “failure of self-regulation by the scientific community because of the lack of transparency”, I dispute that this crisis arose solely due to a singular event that was deemed by many to have been unethical, opaque and illegal. Rather, I argue that the news release of the genome-edited twins pointed to a system of positive deviance within science that contrasts with the image of the genetic engineering community as responsible, reflexive and self-regulating.
The paper examines three determinants of the crisis and the banal system of deviance underlying it: institutional bioethics oversight, credit attribution and reward practices, and the framing of scientific work in the media. This etiology suggests that the #CRISPRbabies controversy is less due to the actions of a “rogue” individual scientist than it is a product of an international community of scientists “caught up in the chain of progress” (Weber 1922).

Author

• Santiago José Molina, University of California Berkeley